Case Study: Rhino

Rhino gives renters more options by replacing traditional security
deposits with a small monthly fee. They hired me to help them better
define their user interface, re-architect their CSS, and integrate with
the Equifax credit reporting API.

About Rhino

Rhino is giving renters more options by replacing traditional security
deposits with a small monthly fee. Their service cuts down the cost of
renting a new apartment signficantly, which gives renters access to better
apartments and more money in their pockets.

How I helped

Rhino engaged me in the period before their planned launch. Two main
tracks of work stood in their way:

Give your users that polished experience

When Rhino came to me asking if I could help them polish their app for
launch, they had built a user onboarding workflow that was functional, but
had some inconsistencies in its design. These included small but
non-trivial issues, like poor background image alignment and mobile
display problems.

I helped the team at Rhino understand their problems through both design
and engineering lenses. When you're nearing launch, it's critical you
consider both the ideal implementation as designed, as well as the
tradeoffs that need to be made in order to deliver a reasonable product by
your deadline. I sought to help clarify that sweet spot for Rhino so they
could launch with a version of the product that gave them confidence in
the marketplace but didn't break their budget.

Get on-demand credit score reporting for your customers

Rhino uses both TransUnion and Equifax to obtain basic credit information
from their renters. Navigating the myriad API options in the Equifax API
documentation can be tricky. I helped Rhino develop a custom API library
to submit credit reporting requests to Equifax and retrieve their
prospective renters' credit score.

Want to integrate credit reporting into your Rails application? Get in
touch and tell me a bit about your product. I'm happy to share
what I know.

What they say

Working with an outsourced development team has had some surprising
upsides: among them the speed with which we were able to build our
initial MVP, but when problems have gotten abstract or needed truly
expert-level resources, things have broken down.

Some problems that had been difficult to not only solve but even define
with other consultants were defined and solved quickly with Teejay after
a brief conversation.

He helped us move our product from something we could launch and live
with to something of which we could be proud, and he didn't want to
commit to work until he knew he could do it to a high level of
satisfaction, and it helped us internally to frame these vague problems
in terms of achievable milestones.

Finding full stack experts who can dive into the project and begin to
immediately deliver results for problems that are not fully known at the
beginning has been a challenge, and Teejay certainly delivered.